Ernest Renan 1823 – 1892

Joseph Ernest Renan was a French Semitic philologist, historian, and philosopher of religion and one of the most influential and controversial public intellectuals of nineteenth-century France. After abandoning seminary studies for academic philology, he produced his Life of Jesus in 1863, presenting Christ as a charismatic Galilean teacher stripped of supernatural elements, and provoking one of the great religious controversies of the century. His Future of Science, his celebrated lecture What Is a Nation?, and his many studies of the history of Israel and early Christianity shaped late nineteenth-century European thought on religion, science, and nationality.

Joseph Ernest Renan was born at Tréguier in Brittany in February 1823 to a sea-captain's family of Catholic tradition. He was trained for the priesthood at the seminaries of Saint-Nicolas du Chardonnet and Saint-Sulpice in Paris, but his philological study of the Bible led him to lose his faith and leave in 1845. He took the agrégation in philosophy, completed in 1852 a doctoral thesis on Averroes, led an archaeological mission to Phoenicia in 1860–1861, and in 1862 was appointed to the chair of Hebrew at the Collège de France, from which the controversy over his Vie de Jésus briefly suspended him. He was elected to the Académie française in 1878.

His works include Averroès et l'averroïsme (1852), the Vie de Jésus (1863), the seven further volumes of the Histoire des origines du christianisme (1863–1883), the five-volume Histoire du peuple d'Israël (1887–1893), L'Avenir de la science (written 1848, published 1890), Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse (1883), and the celebrated Sorbonne lecture Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? (1882).

Renan applied the historical-critical method to the Gospels, presenting Jesus as a charismatic Galilean teacher rather than a divine being, and argued that the nation is a spiritual principle constituted by a shared past and a daily plebiscite of the present rather than by race or language. He died in Paris in October 1892.